Thursday, October 16, 1997

Some writers quit while they’re ahead. J.D. Salinger was one, having published
four first-rate books before clamming up for good. And despite what most of his
cult following will say, those four books are enough. Harper Lee, Ralph
Ellison, and Joseph Mitchell all share (or shared) Salinger’s prudent silence,
choosing for some reason or another to keep their oeuvre tight and
unmarred by decline. Too many other writers, however, just keep cranking them
out. Look at Saul Bellow or John Updike or John Barth. I mean, really, who do
they think they’re fooling?

And
then there’s Kurt Vonnegut. Ya gotta love the old fart for keeping his
old-school left-wing stance firmly planted in the American conscience, but
let’s face facts. His fiction hasn’t been any good for at least a dozen
years—and even that stuff wasn’t that great. His last really good book
was Breakfast of Champions, and that came out in 1973. Since then it
seems like he’s just been coasting, writing book after book of facile truisms
and cute catch phrases. But he’s worn his decline fairly well, always making
even his lesser efforts worth reading, if only for his crusty humanitarianism
and his wacky take on the contemporary scene. It’s only now, with his final
book, Timequake, that things get really depressing.

Timequake’s
original release date was sometime in 1993, but Vonnegut couldn’t get it done
on time. He ended up spending almost a decade on it, but as he writes in the
book’s prologue, he ultimately found himself to be “the creator of a novel
which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in
the first place.”

The
premise is that the universe goes through a “timequake,” with everything and
everyone stopping on February 13th, 2001 and beginning again in February 17th,
1991. Back in the ’90s, everyone finds themselves having to get back to 2001
the hard way: “minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the
wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap gain. You
name it!”

Everything,
including Vonnegut’s science-fiction-writing alter-ego Kilgore Trout, is stuck
on auto pilot for a decade. And when February 13th, 2001 rolls around again,
almost everybody’s stricken with Post-Timequake Apathy, not wanting to even
move, much less take charge of their lives. It’s an interesting enough premise,
with the timequake acting as a springboard for questions of divinity and free
will, but Vonnegut just couldn’t take it anywhere. So what he did was compile
the best parts of it and use them as the center of a freewheeling, jumbled mess
of reminiscences, essays, and fictional sketches. Ultimately, what the novel
ends up being about is not being able to write this novel, which fascinates in
a postmodern kind of way, but it really just ends up sucking.

There
are some real gems buried in the mire, though, and most of them have to do with
the aging Kilgore Trout. As Cynthia Ozick does with her recurring character
Ruth Puttermesser in The Puttermesser Papers, Vonnegut finally kills
Trout off. And Trout goes out in style, with Timequake incorporating
several of his stories and proving the out-of-print sci-fi writer to be a true
prophetic visionary.

The
book’s most amazing section is Trout’s story “Bunker Bingo Party,” an account
of Hitler’s last hour with Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and family. In the
face of imminent death, the Goebbels kids get out their bingo game and teach
Hitler how to play, thus mercifully keeping the villainous thug at peace during
his last few minutes.

This
flash of brilliance may be one of Vonnegut’s finest moments, but it’s hardly
enough to carry the whole book. “Bunker Bingo Party” redeems Trout before he
dies, making Timequake seem like a requiem for Vonnegut’s favorite
character, but what it ends up being is a requiem for Vonnegut’s own lost
brilliance. So it goes.

Scholastic horror stories—why hasn’t anybody thought of doing this before?
After all, what could be more terrifying than academia?

James
Hynes’ new collection, Publish and Perish, comprises three novellas,
each one scarier than a dissertation committee. The first story, “Queen of the
Jungle,” tells the chilling tale of Paul, Elizabeth, and their cat, Charlotte.
While Elizabeth is away at the University of Chicago, Paul has an affair with a
flaky communications major, and Charlotte does her best to foil his dastardly
plans for their family.

Sounds
silly, and it is, but Hynes’ hilarious vision of academic life makes it
stomachable. With Elizabeth schmoozing the tenure board at Chicago, Paul
flounders on his unpublishable dissertation, writing such chapters as
“Slouching Toward Minneapolis: William Butler Yeats, Mary Tyler Moore and the
Millennium.”

The
other two novellas, “99” and “Casting the Runes,” are successful in the same
ways as “Queen of the Jungle”—and to the same extent. They’re all tightly
written, funny, and scary as hell, but a horror story is still a horror story.
Each tale follows a pattern of rising creepiness, with the reader figuring out
if the protagonist deserves to survive, and then the climax passes final
judgment on him or her.

It’s
pretty straightforward stuff, but Hynes’ satires of academia can be
breathtaking—literally. If Perish and Publish shocks at all, with its
desperate doctoral candidates, disgraced theoreticians, and satanic
tenure-dinosaurs, it shocks with recognition.